I hope this is a joke. Not only do I think this is illegal (as the thread has been talking about using models for non-profit purposes) but I think it is immoral too. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and believe you are joking. If I were you I'd clarify...
Since Sixen/vjeux have no problem with it, I'll eventually release an updated version of the importer that supports Lich King models for free. I'm curious as to whether they have updated the M2 format for Cataclysm too, hopefully not as it will require more work :(. I can't give a timeframe as the M3 Importer/Exporter is my main focus at the moment.
The pony tail is a ribbon effect for the zealot. Particles/Ribbons/Lights will be supported in the future. In answer to your question tigerija, particles will be an extension of one of 3ds max's particle objects, with extra settings for everything M3 particles support (similar to how materials work at the moment). So yes it'll be blizz 'shit' kind of thing, a custom particle object. The same will apply to ribbons/lights.
I plan on doing some tutorials once the plugins reach a state I'm happy with. The new update is very close to being released and I may put up some quick tutorials on how to use it then. As for maya, I'm not sure. There's a standard format called COLLADA out there that would act as a nice intermediate format between the editors. My C programming is very weak but I might look into making something like a COLLADA->M3 converter so people aren't forced to use 3ds Max. However there are alot of extra settings in M3's and really any game model format that Maya and 3ds Max need to be told explicitly to export, such as whether to use team colour in the material alpha and animation settings that I can't see being saved in COLLADA from the other modelling programs. So there's an inherent problem with converting from other programs.
I've designed the 3ds Max plugins to be integrated with 3ds Max custom UI's to save settings that are important to how an M3 renders in-game. So while it's possible to have geometry and possibly even animated geometry converted from COLLADA->M3, I don't foresee how the extra settings could be manipulated through maya or any other modelling program unless someone provides 3rd party support. The only way I think this would be possible is to develop a kind of M3 tweaker program that can alter that data specifically independent of the modelling programs. So you'd save it as COLLADA, convert from COLLADA->M3 then use the program to change M3 dependent settings such as team colour, animation moveSpeed, extra particle settings, etc. That is a bit out of my league though. I'd love to be able to create something like Magos created with his Warcraft III Model Editor if I was capable ><
Actually, I updated the code from the very old importer/exporter designed for 3ds max before profet's blizzimporter, it was made by Philip Laing in 2002 (it's the impexpmdx.ms script you may have seen around). Many thanks to him for providing the basis of the code, it reads in the format really well. It took a bit of adjustment but the models are able to be imported nicely with his script, especially because it adds skins and submeshes just as I plan to support with the next M3 plugin update. I'm going to further improve the script when I get a chance so that you can check an 'Import with M3 settings' box and it'll import the MDX using the sc2 definitions I've provided, such as the custom materials and the animations. Basically you should be able to import the model into max and export it straight back out as an M3 with only minor adjustments. The bitmaps will need to be converted as MDX uses blp's, but that's up to the user to convert their maps.
The script runs on my version of 3ds Max 2010 and I imagine will run on any version of max, including those above 3ds Max 5. So far most models read in properly, but some animations won't look right because it's ignoring the tangents when I import. More info on that importer once I'm done with the next update.
Sit tight, I'll be releasing a big new update shortly. Probably 2 or so days and most of the problems with exporting should be gone (I hope!). For your problem, you've added a skin modifier to the mesh? Make sure you add all the bone objects to the skin modifier. All the bones must be 'bone' type too. Next update this won't be necessary, you can use any object, but for v1.3 all the objects need to be bones in the skin modifier.
Bone names don't seem to have any convention at all, so I wouldn't worry too much about what you name them. Attachments do however have a naming convention, you need to give them a certain name so that you can attach new models to them. The next update for the model importer/export will add a new attachment object that will have a drop down list so you can pick the attachment ID you want.
On this topic, I plan on designing a cool kinda plugin at some point that allows you to transfer animations from one model to another aslong as you provide bones that correlate from the old model to the new model. Infact this should be an inherent feature in 3ds Max itself, but I can't find it anywhere. It's lucky 3ds max has maxscript to cover up some of its blatant missing features :P. The idea is you can import the bones from another model, any other model, into a scene then copy and paste their animation data from its bones to your new models bones and get a reasonable duplication of the animation. This means you could animate the marine with ghost animations for example, since their bone structures are quite similar.
Hrm, yes I can see why that wouldn't work knowing how the exporter functions. I never thought of people wanting to duplicate animations like that. I should be able to provide support for it.
At the moment I'm in the middle of a big update for the importer/exporter. I'm very unhappy with the old system of doing things, such as how you're forced to have meshes jammed together in a final mesh with a single skin only. In the next update, every object in the scene can function as a bone and submeshes can be seperate editable meshes altogether. This means you can apply seperate skins to a mesh and it will still export fine. Meshes don't even need skins and a bone will be created for them. Instead of using multimaterials to split a mesh into submeshes, you'll actually be able to have seperate meshes. It should clear up alot of issues and make the plugin a bit more user friendly. I'm noticing some serious short comings with 3ds Max which I never knew existed. Merging two skinned meshes together for instance is a task that will drive you crazy. There's no simple solution, which is stupid, because I could design a plugin that could do it pretty easily.
The new importer/exported *should* provide decal support too. I figured out how decals are done, M3's actually have multiple UV channels used to map textures to a mesh. This can be done in 3ds max too, but I'm having trouble implementing the support properly. It should be available in the new update though.
It's just a standard set by The Hive Workshop. It's not clear what protocol is in place here regarding WoW models. WoW models are more of a gray area for a few reasons. Blizzard is protective over WoW content, probably due to the fact people have to pay on a regular basis to use the client. They also never had any intention of letting people modify or create WoW content. The same does not apply to Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2, which both have software released by Blizzard to directly modify and create new content. Blizzard likes to be the master of their own domain in that way. There's plenty of evidence around the internet of where Blizzard has demonstrated this through court action and general bullying. I'm not exactly opposed to this, it is their content created by their art team, they should have rights to where it is and isn't used, but that's a different topic altogether.
To get WoW models into Starcraft 2 I created an importer that was based around ufoZ's old m2 importer for pre-BC WoW models. The importer I updated allowed it to import post-BC models, but the Lich King introduced changes to the M2 format. The changes are nothing dramatic and I plan to update the importer to handle the new format at some stage. Whether this will be released to the public is another matter as I don't know the legalities behind reverse engineering the M2 format and providing importer plugins for it. I don't want to land myself or sc2mapster in hot water. That will be a topic I'll have to take up with Sixen and vjeux. The bonus is that since the importer was designed by me, WoW models import in a very similar fashion as M3's do. Consequently WoW models are incredibly easy to import and export to M3 straight from 3ds max.
I have updated the old Warcraft 3 model (MDX) importer/exporter designed by Philip Laing in 2002 so that animations are accurate and it no longer crashes. It also imports very similar to how M3's are exported and with a little tweaking can be a powerful MDX -> 3ds Max -> M3 tool. Once I've tested it more and updated it further I'll release it so that people can use Warcraft 3 models in their maps. I know there's alot of passionate Warcraft 3 modders among the Starcraft 2 community.
As for WoW models, it'll depend on the rules in place here and the ultimate legality of using the models in another game. I know Warcraft 3 used alot of low poly WoW models in some maps, but whether that is condoned or not here is another matter. I ask Sixen and vjeux to weigh into this issue, as I believe it will become a heavily debated one just as it is on The Hive Workshop.
I'm working on an update for the exporter, I'm very unhappy with the way meshes have to be jammed together before export. This is especially bad news if you've skinned meshes seperately and then want to export them as an M3. In the next update, I plan to have seperate editable meshes act as submeshes within the model instead of using multimaterials. Also, tigerija will be happy to know I'm planning to make all objects in the scene that aren't editable meshes and that aren't hidden/frozen exportable as bones. This means you won't have to add every damn bone object to the skin list. The skin will be used for vertex weighting information only. I'm looking forward to the update as I feel the exporter will act more like it actually does on Blizzard's end. It also should mean you don't have to bake objects into bones but we'll see how it turns out, it's still a work in progress.
It is 100% the bone you're using to do the rotation. The bone is skewering the mesh. I don't know why it's doing that, something to do with how M3's store bone data. If you make a new bone through create->systems->bones and align the new bone to the middle of the mesh then reskin the mesh to the bone, all your rotations will work properly. Blizzard do the same thing usually, which is probably why their bones don't distort the mesh on export. Your bones can't be skewed it looks like. It's stuffing up the transforms.
Thanks for the info BlinkHawk. When I use TCB Rotation controllers in my maxscript the rotations are not animating properly. M3's don't have in/out tangents for their rotations so I don't know if that's the problem. It seems the interpolation is wrong or something. It mainly affects the beginning of some animations. Not sure how to fix the problem. I'm not good with animation so it's most likely something I'm stuffing up. Animations in 3ds max confuse the crap out of me.
At the moment animation export is very beta. Blizzard animations seem to export correctly but custom animations are having alot of trouble. I'm looking into a fix.
Those are the decal textures. At the moment the exporter doesn't support decal textures properly (I'm looking in to how they're done), so you should clear them in the materials after you import them before you export. Otherwise the decal texture will try to cover the whole model and you'll get the result you see. So remove the decal textures for now and you'll be fine for exporting. Hopefully I can figure out decals and support them in future updates.
It only supports FK animations at the moment. Upon reading the Warcraft III Art Tools documentation, it appears you need to have rotations every 90 degrees or less of rotation. This could be the problem encountered by most models that don't animate properly. I believe BlinkBoy from THW has figured out a solution to this problem so you don't need rotations every 90 degrees (think it introduces more keyframes between rotations if it detects some keyframes are more than 90 degrees) but for now the exporter requires rotations every 90 degrees or less. As far as I know there are no problems with simple scalings/translations. Just remember the rotation rule. Hopefully in future updates I can use BlinkBoy's solution so those kind of rotation restrictions aren't mandatory, although I think it's good animating practice to include those extra rotation keyframes anyway.
hey xcorbo, I got a chance to look at your link model. One of the problems is that it doesn't seem to be skinned properly when I export it as an M3. Even with no animation exported, the bind pose/base pose is distorted at the leg/foot region. I'm not sure what's causing the skin to be distorted exactly, considering it looks fine in 3ds Max. I think if it was reskinned (something I might do just to test) and provided the rotation animation had rotations every 90 degrees or less, everything would be smooth. I'm sure if you checked the spider walk animations that you'd probably find it has rotation keyframes at every 90 degrees or less. This would explain why more complicated animations work better than simple ones.
After messing around with Warcraft 3 models, which are absolutely huge compared to SC2 models, I found a good method for scaling down models without messing up the animations. This is a good method for affecting the whole model with transformations without messing up animations that might be in the root bone of the model (the bone that is the parent of all bones in the model besides attachment/object bones, your models should always have a root bone). Ah I don't know how to do this through the 3ds max interface but I can do it through the listener by typing commands.
The process is like this:
1) Create a new bone at pos [0,0,0]
2) Make the new bone the root bone of the model
3) Scale down the new bone and the whole model will scale down with it, animations won't get distorted
4) Make sure you add the new bone to your skin bones or else the exporter will crash. I'm working on updating the exporter to handle bones outside the skin better but at the moment it'll just crash.
In the listener (Press F11 to bring it up) you can achieve this by typing out the following commands:
Make sure you add the bone to the mesh skin!!! Complicated I know. If anyone knows how to do this through max without having to resort to the listener let me know.
I modded an old warcraft 3 importer and exported some old Warcraft 3 models into SC2. They look pretty bad compared to their new models but it was fun to do :D. Check it out
Thanks to Philip Laing who originally scripted the mdx importer/exporter for 3ds max way back in 2002, and BlinkBoy from TheHiveWorkshop for some animation tips. Without them I could not have done this nearly as quick.
You're better off using the original base pose for each of the meshes, which is set to frame 1 on import by default. There's a relationship between the base frame pose and the way the model is animated. Try setting the base pose to frame 1 and see if it fixes your problems.
As for the weighting, I'm not exactly sure. M3's only support 4 bone weights at maximum so you can only have 4 bone weights. Not too sure on what the problem with the weighting could be.
Cool, I'll use the link model as a good debug model to figure out what's going wrong. I'm seeing a trend that more complicated animations tend to come out looking better than the more simple animations. This could be because complicated animations have more keyframes and the sc2 engine is better at interpolating between more keyframes for rotations. It shouldn't be that way but it's one theory. Anyway cheers for the model it'll be helpful.
Yeah, the exporter is not perfect at exporting animations out of max yet. I've noticed problems with my own custom animations too. Squashed meshes due to bad rotations are common. While the importer is working very well in the animation department, the exporter is still a little way off. However as far as I can see the exporter is able to export all the animations properly that Blizzard uses to animate their M3's. So now it's just fixing up the exporter to be able to handle other animations. If someone doesn't mind supplying me with a very simple .max demonstrating a warped animation or just going through the general process that causes a warped animation that'll be helpful for debugging the problem.
I'll look at some of those errors you brought up. I specifically designed the plugin to update old model animations to include the new data such as looping, frequency, move speed, etc. and will continue to strive for that backward compatibility in future updates. You're correct, a point helper is created and hidden in the scene for storing the animation data you see in the animation ui. Originally I was going to store it in the main mesh, but bones can be imported without the mesh so I needed a separate object to store it all. Selecting anything shouldn't be needed, the exporter scans through all the objects itself, but I'll look into that too. Thanks for the feedback, it's helpful for fixing things I don't catch.
Frames per second works just like it sounds. If you have a 24 frame animation, 1 Frame per second will result in a 24 second animation. I think the FPS export option may be a little bugged so I'll look into it, but I haven't had any major problems with it. The random scale problem I can't comment on. It really sounds like you're doing some weird stuff there tigerija. The exporter is only beta so perhaps start simple and see if you can get a simple animated model into Sc2 to begin with. If you're having trouble getting a simple animated model into Sc2, you can either supply me with the .max or describe to me what you're doing exactly to get such bizzare results so that I can work out how to fix it.
That makes sense, as scaling is designed to affect the speed of the animations. M2's used a similar method in WoW so that when something was scaled up very large its animations ran slower. It would look bizzare if a highly scaled model conducted animations at the same speed as its smaller version. Not sure if that's what you're talking about but it sounds like it.
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@ezbeats: Go
I hope this is a joke. Not only do I think this is illegal (as the thread has been talking about using models for non-profit purposes) but I think it is immoral too. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and believe you are joking. If I were you I'd clarify...
Since Sixen/vjeux have no problem with it, I'll eventually release an updated version of the importer that supports Lich King models for free. I'm curious as to whether they have updated the M2 format for Cataclysm too, hopefully not as it will require more work :(. I can't give a timeframe as the M3 Importer/Exporter is my main focus at the moment.
0
@pzea469: Go
The pony tail is a ribbon effect for the zealot. Particles/Ribbons/Lights will be supported in the future. In answer to your question tigerija, particles will be an extension of one of 3ds max's particle objects, with extra settings for everything M3 particles support (similar to how materials work at the moment). So yes it'll be blizz 'shit' kind of thing, a custom particle object. The same will apply to ribbons/lights.
@tigerija: Go
I plan on doing some tutorials once the plugins reach a state I'm happy with. The new update is very close to being released and I may put up some quick tutorials on how to use it then. As for maya, I'm not sure. There's a standard format called COLLADA out there that would act as a nice intermediate format between the editors. My C programming is very weak but I might look into making something like a COLLADA->M3 converter so people aren't forced to use 3ds Max. However there are alot of extra settings in M3's and really any game model format that Maya and 3ds Max need to be told explicitly to export, such as whether to use team colour in the material alpha and animation settings that I can't see being saved in COLLADA from the other modelling programs. So there's an inherent problem with converting from other programs.
I've designed the 3ds Max plugins to be integrated with 3ds Max custom UI's to save settings that are important to how an M3 renders in-game. So while it's possible to have geometry and possibly even animated geometry converted from COLLADA->M3, I don't foresee how the extra settings could be manipulated through maya or any other modelling program unless someone provides 3rd party support. The only way I think this would be possible is to develop a kind of M3 tweaker program that can alter that data specifically independent of the modelling programs. So you'd save it as COLLADA, convert from COLLADA->M3 then use the program to change M3 dependent settings such as team colour, animation moveSpeed, extra particle settings, etc. That is a bit out of my league though. I'd love to be able to create something like Magos created with his Warcraft III Model Editor if I was capable ><
0
@BlinkHawk: Go
Actually, I updated the code from the very old importer/exporter designed for 3ds max before profet's blizzimporter, it was made by Philip Laing in 2002 (it's the impexpmdx.ms script you may have seen around). Many thanks to him for providing the basis of the code, it reads in the format really well. It took a bit of adjustment but the models are able to be imported nicely with his script, especially because it adds skins and submeshes just as I plan to support with the next M3 plugin update. I'm going to further improve the script when I get a chance so that you can check an 'Import with M3 settings' box and it'll import the MDX using the sc2 definitions I've provided, such as the custom materials and the animations. Basically you should be able to import the model into max and export it straight back out as an M3 with only minor adjustments. The bitmaps will need to be converted as MDX uses blp's, but that's up to the user to convert their maps.
The script runs on my version of 3ds Max 2010 and I imagine will run on any version of max, including those above 3ds Max 5. So far most models read in properly, but some animations won't look right because it's ignoring the tangents when I import. More info on that importer once I'm done with the next update.
0
@pzea469: Go
Sit tight, I'll be releasing a big new update shortly. Probably 2 or so days and most of the problems with exporting should be gone (I hope!). For your problem, you've added a skin modifier to the mesh? Make sure you add all the bone objects to the skin modifier. All the bones must be 'bone' type too. Next update this won't be necessary, you can use any object, but for v1.3 all the objects need to be bones in the skin modifier.
0
@tigerija: Go
Bone names don't seem to have any convention at all, so I wouldn't worry too much about what you name them. Attachments do however have a naming convention, you need to give them a certain name so that you can attach new models to them. The next update for the model importer/export will add a new attachment object that will have a drop down list so you can pick the attachment ID you want.
On this topic, I plan on designing a cool kinda plugin at some point that allows you to transfer animations from one model to another aslong as you provide bones that correlate from the old model to the new model. Infact this should be an inherent feature in 3ds Max itself, but I can't find it anywhere. It's lucky 3ds max has maxscript to cover up some of its blatant missing features :P. The idea is you can import the bones from another model, any other model, into a scene then copy and paste their animation data from its bones to your new models bones and get a reasonable duplication of the animation. This means you could animate the marine with ghost animations for example, since their bone structures are quite similar.
0
@xcorbo: Go
Hrm, yes I can see why that wouldn't work knowing how the exporter functions. I never thought of people wanting to duplicate animations like that. I should be able to provide support for it.
@tigerija: Go
At the moment I'm in the middle of a big update for the importer/exporter. I'm very unhappy with the old system of doing things, such as how you're forced to have meshes jammed together in a final mesh with a single skin only. In the next update, every object in the scene can function as a bone and submeshes can be seperate editable meshes altogether. This means you can apply seperate skins to a mesh and it will still export fine. Meshes don't even need skins and a bone will be created for them. Instead of using multimaterials to split a mesh into submeshes, you'll actually be able to have seperate meshes. It should clear up alot of issues and make the plugin a bit more user friendly. I'm noticing some serious short comings with 3ds Max which I never knew existed. Merging two skinned meshes together for instance is a task that will drive you crazy. There's no simple solution, which is stupid, because I could design a plugin that could do it pretty easily.
The new importer/exported *should* provide decal support too. I figured out how decals are done, M3's actually have multiple UV channels used to map textures to a mesh. This can be done in 3ds max too, but I'm having trouble implementing the support properly. It should be available in the new update though.
0
@HungryHipp0: Go
It's just a standard set by The Hive Workshop. It's not clear what protocol is in place here regarding WoW models. WoW models are more of a gray area for a few reasons. Blizzard is protective over WoW content, probably due to the fact people have to pay on a regular basis to use the client. They also never had any intention of letting people modify or create WoW content. The same does not apply to Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2, which both have software released by Blizzard to directly modify and create new content. Blizzard likes to be the master of their own domain in that way. There's plenty of evidence around the internet of where Blizzard has demonstrated this through court action and general bullying. I'm not exactly opposed to this, it is their content created by their art team, they should have rights to where it is and isn't used, but that's a different topic altogether.
To get WoW models into Starcraft 2 I created an importer that was based around ufoZ's old m2 importer for pre-BC WoW models. The importer I updated allowed it to import post-BC models, but the Lich King introduced changes to the M2 format. The changes are nothing dramatic and I plan to update the importer to handle the new format at some stage. Whether this will be released to the public is another matter as I don't know the legalities behind reverse engineering the M2 format and providing importer plugins for it. I don't want to land myself or sc2mapster in hot water. That will be a topic I'll have to take up with Sixen and vjeux. The bonus is that since the importer was designed by me, WoW models import in a very similar fashion as M3's do. Consequently WoW models are incredibly easy to import and export to M3 straight from 3ds max.
I have updated the old Warcraft 3 model (MDX) importer/exporter designed by Philip Laing in 2002 so that animations are accurate and it no longer crashes. It also imports very similar to how M3's are exported and with a little tweaking can be a powerful MDX -> 3ds Max -> M3 tool. Once I've tested it more and updated it further I'll release it so that people can use Warcraft 3 models in their maps. I know there's alot of passionate Warcraft 3 modders among the Starcraft 2 community.
As for WoW models, it'll depend on the rules in place here and the ultimate legality of using the models in another game. I know Warcraft 3 used alot of low poly WoW models in some maps, but whether that is condoned or not here is another matter. I ask Sixen and vjeux to weigh into this issue, as I believe it will become a heavily debated one just as it is on The Hive Workshop.
0
@PrivateTickles: Go
I'm working on an update for the exporter, I'm very unhappy with the way meshes have to be jammed together before export. This is especially bad news if you've skinned meshes seperately and then want to export them as an M3. In the next update, I plan to have seperate editable meshes act as submeshes within the model instead of using multimaterials. Also, tigerija will be happy to know I'm planning to make all objects in the scene that aren't editable meshes and that aren't hidden/frozen exportable as bones. This means you won't have to add every damn bone object to the skin list. The skin will be used for vertex weighting information only. I'm looking forward to the update as I feel the exporter will act more like it actually does on Blizzard's end. It also should mean you don't have to bake objects into bones but we'll see how it turns out, it's still a work in progress.
0
@tigerija: Go
It is 100% the bone you're using to do the rotation. The bone is skewering the mesh. I don't know why it's doing that, something to do with how M3's store bone data. If you make a new bone through create->systems->bones and align the new bone to the middle of the mesh then reskin the mesh to the bone, all your rotations will work properly. Blizzard do the same thing usually, which is probably why their bones don't distort the mesh on export. Your bones can't be skewed it looks like. It's stuffing up the transforms.
0
@tigerija: Go
Cool, a good reference model. I'm looking into the problem now. Thanks tigerija.
@BlinkHawk: Go
Thanks for the info BlinkHawk. When I use TCB Rotation controllers in my maxscript the rotations are not animating properly. M3's don't have in/out tangents for their rotations so I don't know if that's the problem. It seems the interpolation is wrong or something. It mainly affects the beginning of some animations. Not sure how to fix the problem. I'm not good with animation so it's most likely something I'm stuffing up. Animations in 3ds max confuse the crap out of me.
At the moment animation export is very beta. Blizzard animations seem to export correctly but custom animations are having alot of trouble. I'm looking into a fix.
0
@Thebillsta: Go
Those are the decal textures. At the moment the exporter doesn't support decal textures properly (I'm looking in to how they're done), so you should clear them in the materials after you import them before you export. Otherwise the decal texture will try to cover the whole model and you'll get the result you see. So remove the decal textures for now and you'll be fine for exporting. Hopefully I can figure out decals and support them in future updates.
@crazyfingers619: Go
It only supports FK animations at the moment. Upon reading the Warcraft III Art Tools documentation, it appears you need to have rotations every 90 degrees or less of rotation. This could be the problem encountered by most models that don't animate properly. I believe BlinkBoy from THW has figured out a solution to this problem so you don't need rotations every 90 degrees (think it introduces more keyframes between rotations if it detects some keyframes are more than 90 degrees) but for now the exporter requires rotations every 90 degrees or less. As far as I know there are no problems with simple scalings/translations. Just remember the rotation rule. Hopefully in future updates I can use BlinkBoy's solution so those kind of rotation restrictions aren't mandatory, although I think it's good animating practice to include those extra rotation keyframes anyway.
@xcorbo: Go
hey xcorbo, I got a chance to look at your link model. One of the problems is that it doesn't seem to be skinned properly when I export it as an M3. Even with no animation exported, the bind pose/base pose is distorted at the leg/foot region. I'm not sure what's causing the skin to be distorted exactly, considering it looks fine in 3ds Max. I think if it was reskinned (something I might do just to test) and provided the rotation animation had rotations every 90 degrees or less, everything would be smooth. I'm sure if you checked the spider walk animations that you'd probably find it has rotation keyframes at every 90 degrees or less. This would explain why more complicated animations work better than simple ones.
0
@tigerija: Go
After messing around with Warcraft 3 models, which are absolutely huge compared to SC2 models, I found a good method for scaling down models without messing up the animations. This is a good method for affecting the whole model with transformations without messing up animations that might be in the root bone of the model (the bone that is the parent of all bones in the model besides attachment/object bones, your models should always have a root bone). Ah I don't know how to do this through the 3ds max interface but I can do it through the listener by typing commands.
The process is like this:
1) Create a new bone at pos [0,0,0]
2) Make the new bone the root bone of the model
3) Scale down the new bone and the whole model will scale down with it, animations won't get distorted
4) Make sure you add the new bone to your skin bones or else the exporter will crash. I'm working on updating the exporter to handle bones outside the skin better but at the moment it'll just crash.
In the listener (Press F11 to bring it up) you can achieve this by typing out the following commands:
Make sure you add the bone to the mesh skin!!! Complicated I know. If anyone knows how to do this through max without having to resort to the listener let me know.
0
I modded an old warcraft 3 importer and exported some old Warcraft 3 models into SC2. They look pretty bad compared to their new models but it was fun to do :D. Check it out
Thanks to Philip Laing who originally scripted the mdx importer/exporter for 3ds max way back in 2002, and BlinkBoy from TheHiveWorkshop for some animation tips. Without them I could not have done this nearly as quick.
0
@Triceron: Go
You're better off using the original base pose for each of the meshes, which is set to frame 1 on import by default. There's a relationship between the base frame pose and the way the model is animated. Try setting the base pose to frame 1 and see if it fixes your problems.
As for the weighting, I'm not exactly sure. M3's only support 4 bone weights at maximum so you can only have 4 bone weights. Not too sure on what the problem with the weighting could be.
@xcorbo: Go
Cool, I'll use the link model as a good debug model to figure out what's going wrong. I'm seeing a trend that more complicated animations tend to come out looking better than the more simple animations. This could be because complicated animations have more keyframes and the sc2 engine is better at interpolating between more keyframes for rotations. It shouldn't be that way but it's one theory. Anyway cheers for the model it'll be helpful.
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@ltitans: Go
Yeah, the exporter is not perfect at exporting animations out of max yet. I've noticed problems with my own custom animations too. Squashed meshes due to bad rotations are common. While the importer is working very well in the animation department, the exporter is still a little way off. However as far as I can see the exporter is able to export all the animations properly that Blizzard uses to animate their M3's. So now it's just fixing up the exporter to be able to handle other animations. If someone doesn't mind supplying me with a very simple .max demonstrating a warped animation or just going through the general process that causes a warped animation that'll be helpful for debugging the problem.
@xcorbo: Go
I'll look at some of those errors you brought up. I specifically designed the plugin to update old model animations to include the new data such as looping, frequency, move speed, etc. and will continue to strive for that backward compatibility in future updates. You're correct, a point helper is created and hidden in the scene for storing the animation data you see in the animation ui. Originally I was going to store it in the main mesh, but bones can be imported without the mesh so I needed a separate object to store it all. Selecting anything shouldn't be needed, the exporter scans through all the objects itself, but I'll look into that too. Thanks for the feedback, it's helpful for fixing things I don't catch.
@tigerija: Go
Frames per second works just like it sounds. If you have a 24 frame animation, 1 Frame per second will result in a 24 second animation. I think the FPS export option may be a little bugged so I'll look into it, but I haven't had any major problems with it. The random scale problem I can't comment on. It really sounds like you're doing some weird stuff there tigerija. The exporter is only beta so perhaps start simple and see if you can get a simple animated model into Sc2 to begin with. If you're having trouble getting a simple animated model into Sc2, you can either supply me with the .max or describe to me what you're doing exactly to get such bizzare results so that I can work out how to fix it.
@Ravathor: Go
That makes sense, as scaling is designed to affect the speed of the animations. M2's used a similar method in WoW so that when something was scaled up very large its animations ran slower. It would look bizzare if a highly scaled model conducted animations at the same speed as its smaller version. Not sure if that's what you're talking about but it sounds like it.